The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh

INTRODUCING DC FFION MORGAN, IN THE UNMISSABLE NEW SERIES FROM #1 BESTSELLER CLARE MACKINTOSH

'Superb, with echoes of Agatha Christie' PATRICIA CORNWELL
'A dark delight of a murder mystery' JANICE HALLETT
'Detectives Leo and Ffion make a storming debut' BELINDA BAUER
'Mackintosh is just getting better and better' PETER JAMES

On New Year's Eve, Rhys Lloyd has a house full of guests.
His lakeside holiday homes are a success, and he's generously invited the village to drink champagne with their wealthy new neighbours. This will be the party to end all parties.

But not everyone is there to celebrate. By midnight, Rhys will be floating dead in the freezing waters of the lake.

On New Year's Day, DC Ffion Morgan has a village full of suspects.
The tiny community is her home, so the suspects are her neighbours, friends and family - and Ffion has her own secrets to protect.

With a lie uncovered at every turn, soon the question isn't who wanted Rhys dead . . . but who finally killed him.

In a village with this many secrets, a murder is just the beginning.Sometimes, revisiting the past is the only way to rescue the present . . . 

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Going into a new Clare Mackintosh novel is like opening a lucky bag - you know you are going to get something good but you’re not sure what it will be like. The last three of her books I have read have been uniformly good but radically different - AFTER THE END, a profoundly moving story about the choices faced by parents of a terminally ill child; HOSTAGE, a plane hijack novel which flew much higher, and was better written, than another, very hyped book on a similar theme which was released at the same time; and this, THE LAST PARTY, a modern whodunnit with interesting characters, snappy dialogue and an intriguingly fun protagonist in DC Ffion Morgan.

There are echoes of Agatha Christie, even the likes of Midsummer Murders, in the story of the investigation into the murder of the developer of a lakeside holiday complex on the Welsh border. The holiday homes are occupied by a cast of suspects, each less likeable than the last, each seemingly with a reason to want Rhys Lloyd dead. Ffion, like Lloyd, a local also has to consider her friends and neighbours as potential suspects - few in the village welcomed the influx of rich English people on their lake. Ffion’s situation gets even more complicated when she is paired with Detective Leo Brady from Chester Police, who turns out to be a one night stand to whom she gave a fake name.

As might be expected from Clare Mackintosh, the story is a little darker, the characters more rounded than your typical cosy murder mystery. There is a lot of humour in the book but it goes deeper, into relationships, workplace bullying, racism, exploitation. There is a lot more going on than appears on the surface and that is something that THE LAST PARTY shares with the author’s other novels. DC Ffion Morgan will apparently return and I really hope that THE LAST PARTY is the first in a successful series.

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With over 2 million copies of her books sold worldwide, number one bestseller Clare Mackintosh is the multi-award-winning author of I Let You Go, which was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and the fastest-selling title by a new crime writer in 2015. It also won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in 2016. Both Clare's second and third novels, I See You and Let Me Lie, were number one Sunday Times bestsellers. All three of her thrillers were selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club, and together have been translated into forty languages. After the End was published in 2019 and became an instant Sunday Times bestseller, and in 2021 Hostage flew straight into the top ten. Together, her books have spent more than sixty weeks in The Sunday Times bestseller lists.